The product strategy involves deciding what goods and services the firm should

offer to a group of consumers and also making decisions about customer service, brand
name, packaging, labeling, product life cycles and new product development. The pricing
strategy deals with the methods of setting profitable and justifiable prices. Marketers
develop place (distribution) strategy to ensure that consumers find their products
available in the proper quantities at the right times and places. Place-related decisions
involve the distribution functions and marketing intermediaries (channel members). In
the promotional strategy, marketers blend together the various elements of promotion to
communicate most effectively with their target market. Many firms use an approach
called Integrate Marketing Communications (IMC) to coordinate all promotional
activities so that the consumer receives a unified, consistent and effective message.
Marketers do not make decisions about target markets and marketing mix
variables in a vacuum. They must take into account the dynamic nature of the five
marketing environmental dimensions as shown in Figure 1.1.1 – competitive, political-
legal, economic, technological and social-cultural dimensions. Marketers compete for the
same consumers. So the developments in the competitive environment will have lot of
repercussions. The political-legal environment includes the governing and regulatory
bodies who impose guidelines to the marketers. Adherence to the law of the land is an
imperative for a marketer to be a good and responsible corporate citizen. The economic
environment dictates the mood in the target market who take decisions such as to buy or
save, to buy now or later. The technological environment can spell life or death for a
marketer with break-through technologies. Marketers often leap forward or get left
behind owing to the changes in the technological environment. The social-cultural
environment offers cues for the marketers to ‘connect’ well with the target market.
Failure on part of the marketer to understand the social-cultural environment will have
serious consequences. A marketers can not afford to rub a society/culture on the wrong
side!

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Extending the Traditional Boundaries of Marketing

Until fairly recently, marketing focused primarily on exchanges of goods between

individuals (business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing) and businesses (business-to-
business (B2B) marketing). Industrial marketing deals with the organizational purchases
of goods to support production of other goods or daily operations or for resale. Table
1.1.2 highlights the differences between consumer marketing and industrial marketing.

Table 1.1.2 Differences between Industrial and Consumer Marketing

Areas of Industrial Markets Consumer Markets

Difference (B2B) (B2C)
Market  Geographically concentrated  Geographically dispersed
characteristics  Relatively fewer buyers  Mass markets

Product  Technical complexity  Standardized products

characteristics  Customized products

Service  Service, timely delivery and  Service, timely delivery

characteristics availability are critical and availability are
somewhat important

Buyer  Involvement of cross-  Involvement of family

behaviour functional teams in both members
buyer and supplier firms
 Purchase decisions are  Purchase decisions are
mainly made on mostly made on
rational/performance basis physiological/social/
 Technical expertise sought psychological needs
 Stable interpersonal  Less technical expertise
relationship between buyer  Non-personal relationship
and seller

Channel  More direct channels  Indirect channels

characteristics  Fewer intermediaries/  Multiple layers of
middlemen intermediaries

Promotional  Emphasis on personal selling  Emphasis on advertising

characteristics

Price  Competitive bidding and  List prices or maximum

characteristics negotiated prices retail price (MRP)
 List prices for standard
products

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 With the growth of the services sector, marketers realized that services cannot be
marketed in the same way as the products. Certain characteristics of services posed
serious problems for marketers who realized that services marketing must be done
differently and not with the same marketing mix (4 Ps) variables. Service characteristics
like intangibility (service firms don’t sell a tangible thing, but a promise) inseparability
(production and consumption of services take place at about the same time),
heterogeneity (the problem due to the fact that no two service providers are like, nor are
the service consumers) and perishability (service providers cannot maintain inventories of
their products). To cope with these challenges, service marketers suggest additional 3 Ps
– process, physical evidence and people. The process is aimed at solving the
heterogeneity or variability problem associated with the services by providing a service
blueprint. The physical evidence solves some of the problems associated with the
intangible nature of services. The physical evidence in terms of service environment,
equipment, personnel and so on attempts to tangibilize the intangible. The final P –
People – gives lot of attention to the service providers because they are, strictly speaking,
part of the service provided. They can influence the perceived service quality in a big
way.
With the world becoming a global village, marketers started targeting global
audience for their products and services. International marketers implement the basic
marketing framework discussed earlier. However transactions that cross national
boundaries encounter an additional set of environmental factors. For example, differences
in laws, economic conditions, cultural and business norms and consumer preferences
other demand variations in marketing strategies. The biggest challenge in international
marketing is managing the international business environment. With many
uncontrollable factors, sharing complex relationships among them, the international
marketer faces the dilemma of whether to standardize or differentiate his marketing mix.
Non-profit organizations encounter a special set of characteristics that influence
their marketing activities. Like for-profit firms, non-profit firms may market tangible
goods and/or intangible services and operate in B2C and B2B markets. An important
distinction is that profit-seeking businesses tend to focus their marketing on just one

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public – their customers. Non-profit businesses however must often market to multiple
publics (say, their clients and sponsors), which complicates decision making regarding
the markets to target. Also a customer or service user may wield less control over the
organization’s destiny than would be true for customers of a profit-seeking firm. As a
result, non-profit marketing must fine tune its marketing variables to adjust to these
conditions.

Activity 1.1.4
Match the following:

(1) Product marketing - (A) AIDS awareness campaign

(2) Service marketing - (B) Selling iron ore to a steel manufacturer
(3) Consumer marketing - (C) Selling ice creams to adults
(4) Industrial marketing - (D) Disney setting up a park in Hong Kong
(5) International marketing - (E) Setting up an ayurvedic massage center
(6) Non-profit marketing - (F) Selling electric bulbs

Functions of Marketing

Firms must spend money to create time, place and ownership utilities as discussed
earlier. Several studies have been made to measure marketing costs in relation to overall
product costs and service costs and most estimates have ranged between 40-60 percent.
These costs are not associated with raw materials or any of the other production functions
necessary for creating form utility. What then does the consumer receive in return for this
proportion of marketing cost? This question is answered by understanding the functions
performed by marketing.
In the following table, marketing is responsible for the performance of 8 universal
functions: buying, selling, transporting, storing, standardizing and grading, financing, risk
taking and securing marketing information. Some functions are performed by
manufacturers, others by marketing intermediaries like wholesalers and retailers. Buying
and selling, the first two functions represent exchange functions. Transporting and storing
are physical distribution functions. The final four marketing functions – standardizing
and grading, financing, risk taking and securing market information – are often called
facilitating functions because they assist the marketer in performing the exchange and
physical distribution functions.

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Table 1.1.3 Functions of Marketing

Marketing function Description

A. Exchange functions
1. Buying Ensuring that product offerings are
available in sufficient quantities to meet
customer demands
2. Selling Using advertising, personal selling and sales
promotion to match goods and services to
customer needs
B. Physical distribution functions
3. Transporting Moving products from their points of
production to locations convenient for
purchasers
4. Storing Warehousing products until needed for sale
C. Facilitating functions
5. Standardizing and grading Ensuring that product offerings meet
established quality and quantity control
standards of size, weight and so on
6. Financing Providing credit for channel members or
consumers
7. Risk taking Dealing with uncertainty about consumer
purchases resulting from creation and
marketing of goods and services that
consumers may purchase in the future
8. Securing marketing information Collecting information about consumers,
competitors and channel members for use in
marketing decision making

Case Study: Master of the Online Supermall

(excerpt from Business Today, May 2004)

Amazon.com could well go down in history as a love child born of the heady fling
that the stockmarket had with dotcoms in the late 1990s. But the company, founded by
Jeff Bezos in July 1995 when the internet was still an untested business medium, is a
survivor-par-excellence. It floundered a bit in the swirl of the dotcom bust, but unlike
thousands that were swept away, Amazon.com reinvented itself and emerged stronger.
The 40-year old Bezos, a computer science grad from Princeton University, is the pioneer
of Internet Retailing. His compelling vision introduced a new paradigm for retail, the
click-and-buy model; buy goods from a website instead of a physical store, from

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